Media Dissidence And The War In Ukraine

This volume examines the global media coverage of the armed conflict in Ukraine, focusing on the marginalization of dissident perspectives in the West and the information quality and diversity on social media. Along with presenting original, empirical studies on how mainstream media in countries as diverse as Israel, the Czech Republic, Ghana, and the Netherlands have covered the conflict between NATO and Russia since 2022, this book sheds light on the role of the state and the media in policing the boundaries of permissible thought on the conflict in the West, as well as in Russia and Ukraine. It also delves into the war’s representation on prominent social media platforms. Written by a diverse group of international researchers, this multifaceted volume offers new perspectives and insights on the reporting of the ongoing conflict. It will interest scholars of international communication and media, foreign policy and international politics, war and conflict, content analysis, and journalism.

This cutting-edge text offers an introduction to the emerging field of media archaeology and analyses the innovative theoretical and artistic methodology used to excavate current media through its past. Written with a steampunk attitude, What is Media Archaeology? examines the theoretical challenges of studying digital culture and memory and opens up the sedimented layers of contemporary media culture. The author contextualizes media archaeology in relation to other key media studies debates including software studies, German media theory, imaginary media research, new materialism and digital humanities. What is Media Archaeology? advances an innovative theoretical position while also presenting an engaging and accessible overview for students of media, film and cultural studies. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the interdisciplinary ties between art, technology and media.

This book is the first to provide an in-depth understanding of the 2014 crisis, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and Europe’s de facto war between Russia and Ukraine. The book provides a historical and contemporary understanding behind President Vladimir Putin Russia’s obsession with Ukraine and why Western opprobrium and sanctions have not deterred Russian military aggression. The volume provides a wealth of detail about the inability of Russia, from the time of the Tsarist Empire, throughout the era of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and since the dissolution of the latter in 1991, to accept Ukraine as an independent country and Ukrainians as a people distinct and separate from Russians. The book highlights the sources of this lack of acceptance in aspects of Russian national identity. In the Soviet period, Russians principally identified themselves not with the Russian Soviet Federative Republic, but rather with the USSR as a whole. Attempts in the 1990s to forge a post-imperial Russian civic identity grounded in the newly independent Russian Federation were unpopular, and notions of a far larger Russian ‘imagined community’ came to the fore. A post-Soviet integration of Tsarist Russian great power nationalism and White Russian émigré chauvinism had already transformed and hardened Russian denial of the existence of Ukraine and Ukrainians as a people, even prior to the 2014 crises in Crimea and the Donbas. Bringing an end to both the Russian occupation of Crimea and to the broader Russian–Ukrainian conflict can be expected to meet obstacles not only from the Russian de facto President-for-life, Vladimir Putin, but also from how Russia perceives its national identity.

This book examines the abolitionist and labor press, black power publications of the 1960s, the crusade against the barbarism of lynching, the women's movement, and antiwar journals. Streitmatter also discusses gay and lesbian publications, contemporary on-line journals, and counterculture papers like The Kudzu and The Berkeley Barb that flourished in the 1960s.

This volume examines the legacy of the East–West divide since the implosion of the communist regimes in Europe. The ideals of 1989 have largely been frustrated by the crises and turmoil of the past decade. The liberal consensus was first challenged as early as the mid-2000s. In Eastern Europe, grievances were directed against the prevailing narratives of transition and ever sharper ethnic-racial antipathies surfaced in opposition to a supposedly postnational and multicultural West. In Western Europe, voices regretting the European Union's supposedly careless and premature expansion eastward began to appear on both sides of the left–right and liberal–conservative divides. The possibility of convergence between Europe's two halves has been reconceived as a threat to the European project. In a series of original essays and conversations, thirty-three contributors from the fields of European and global history, politics and culture address questions fundamental to our understanding of Europe today: How have perceptions and misperceptions between the two halves of the continent changed over the last three decades? Can one speak of a new East–West split? If so, what characterizes it and why has it reemerged? The contributions demonstrate a great variety of approaches, perspectives, emphases, and arguments in addressing the daunting dilemma of Europe's assumed East–West divide.

Western democracy is currently under attack by a resurgent Russia, weaponizing new technologies and social media. How to respond? During the Cold War, the West fought off similar Soviet propaganda assaults with shortwave radio broadcasts. Founded in 1949, the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty broadcast uncensored information to the Soviet republics in their own languages. About one-third of Soviet urban adults listened to Western radio. The broadcasts played a key role in ending the Cold War and eroding the communist empire. R. Eugene Parta was for many years the director of Soviet Area Audience Research at RFE/RL, charged among others with gathering listener feedback. In this book he relates a remarkable Cold War operation to assess the impact of Western radio broadcasts on Soviet listeners by using a novel survey research approach. Given the impossibility of interviewing Soviet citizens in their own country, it pioneered audacious interview methods in order to fly under the radar and talk to Soviets traveling abroad, ultimately creating a database of 51,000 interviews which offered unparalleled insights into the media habits and mindset of the Soviet public. By recounting how the “impossible” mission was carried out, Under the Radar also shows how the lessons of the past can help counter the threat from a once and current adversary.

Freedom as a concept shifts with different forms of expression. As the authors of this volume convey in their focus on 'freedom of expression', the idea of 'freedom' in the twenty-first century does not stand apart as a purely physical location marked by national borders. In the Internet Age information is increasingly co-determinate of physical freedom. The information-dense space of the protests of 2021, and beyond, provide soil for the intellectuals writing in this volume to reflect on women’s agency in struggles for human rights. Where historical discourse on “The Woman Question” once conflicted with “feminism” as a perceived importation from the West, this conflict also produced productive tensions that have provided ongoing sites for research. When closely studied, these contexts can deepen global concepts of democracy and justice, providing not only pathways for acts of solidarity and mutual assistance, but intellectual depth and breadth for the future 'ways of knowing', and thus ways of creating, more equitable post-conflict power systems and citizenship amid times of revolution and war. Coming from multiple generations, gender identities, nationalities, and language; the authors in this volume represent the most forward-thinking voices and figures working on gender in the region today.

The widespread uptake of digital platforms – from YouTube and Instagram to Twitch and TikTok – is reconfiguring cultural production in profound, complex, and highly uneven ways. Longstanding media industries are experiencing tremendous upheaval, while new industrial formations – live-streaming, social media influencing, and podcasting, among others – are evolving at breakneck speed. Poell, Nieborg, and Duffy explore both the processes and the implications of platformization across the cultural industries, identifying key changes in markets, infrastructures, and governance at play in this ongoing transformation, as well as pivotal shifts in the practices of labor, creativity, and democracy. The authors foreground three particular industries – news, gaming, and social media creation – and also draw upon examples from music, advertising, and more. Diverse in its geographic scope, Platforms and Cultural Production builds on the latest research and accounts from across North America, Western Europe, Southeast Asia, and China to reveal crucial differences and surprising parallels in the trajectories of platformization across the globe. Offering a novel conceptual framework grounded in illuminating case studies, this book is essential for students, scholars, policymakers, and practitioners seeking to understand how the institutions and practices of cultural production are transforming – and what the stakes are for understanding platform power.